Administrators, Start Your Backup Engines...: Ultrabac 6.3

UltraBac has several unique abilities. The extra cost UltraCopy option
can make up to 31 separate copies of tape or disk, can change while copying
from tape to disk or vice versa, or even change to different tape media.
UB also has available a locked file manager agent to back up exclusively
opened files such as a WINS database or mailbox files. UB can check tape
status before a scheduled job and send notification of wrong tape or no
tape to an administrator. UB claims to eliminate most “shoeshining,” which
is when a tape drive shuttles back and forth repeatedly to search for
a file, via its Express Index, stored on disk. Both the compression and
the speed of UB were the best of any product I tested: My overall backup
speed was 17.3 MB/minute. I was also able to execute foreground programs
with little delay.

UltraBac includes the ability to back up to disk anywhere on the network,
thus simplifying upgrades or moves. Optional “flashing” technology—storing
an image to media, then restoring to disk—lets UB clone servers and workstations.
Also new to this UB release is Windows XP support and network disaster
recovery from a single floppy. OS partitions may be recovered from any
network share with the DOS floppy, and complete disk recovery can be done
locally. As with the other products, UB supports clustering, remote backups,
tape arrays, some Linux versions, and messaging and database agents.

UB’s main drawback is that some of the user interface options are nonintuitive.
To create a job of all drives, you create and save a set containing all
disks to the computer name. You may select the type of backup job from
an optional wizard-like screen, then load the set. You’re prompted to
select the drive from the set. This is confusing because you can’t select
all drives in the “Select a Drive to View” screen, yet that’s what you
selected for the new backup job. The backup of an entire server may be
more clearly understood by choosing each volume to be one job and then
scheduling all volumes.

To schedule an immediate job with UltraBac, double-click
on the saved set, uncheck the enable box and select a day. This is
not intuitively obvious. (Click image to view larger version.)

UltraBac can backup and restore some system state information, as well
as junction points. System state may only be restored locally, though
the registry can be backed up remotely. The explanation of the system
state, and what components are included, is lucid and helped by a chart
showing what components are part of which OS setup. Read this section
carefully before doing system state/AD restores and ignore the typos mixing
up authoritative vs. non-authoritative restores.

About the Author

Douglas Mechaber, MCSE, MCNE, CCDA, is a network consultant and dive instructor and is always on the lookout for utilities that make his life easier, or panulirus interruptus, the California spiny lobster.